At the CanLII Hackfest in Ottawa this weekend I learned, among a great many other things, about a simple, neat tool that’s already been built with the CanLII API: Common Cases. It enables you to insert up to ten URLs of cases and kicks out citations that your cases have in common. I can see how this might be a useful shortcut for researchers at some points, enabling them to zero in on a core cluster of decisions with rapidity.

The bonus feature is that on the Common Cases page you’re reminded by links of a couple of other, earlier tools from CanLII: browser search plugins and CanLII’s hyperlinking tool (via Lexum’s LexHub), which supplies active hyperlinks for cases mentioned in the document (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .html) you supply. (While I’m on search tools, you might like to be reminded that a bunch of Javascript bookmarklets for searching CanLII that I developed a long time ago, still work and are still available on Slaw; depending on which you call up, you can choose whether you want to search all of CanLII or only in a certain field.)